I was recently creating a small tool in PHP and found myself hitting the max execution time and getting a fatal error. As it was only for my personal use I just bumped up the max execution time but it made me stop and think about how I could improve the speed of those scripts I do put up for public use. Most people aren't going to wait for 60 seconds for a page to load. Naturally I hit the internet looking for tips.

The tips he came across (each including the simple benchmarks to show the differences) were:

• sizeof vs count
• is_int vs is_integer
• chop vs rtrim
• doubleval vs floatval
• fwrite vs fputs
• implode vs join
• ini_alter vs ini_set

Be sure to also check out his follow up post talking about building better benchmarks to test the sorts of tips he's given above.

The schedule includes plenty of relaxing time spent camping, hiking and even a few PHP-related discussions thrown in, just for something different. Two official speakers are giving their talks first thing on Day Two and Day Three:

• Ben Ramsey on REST
• Chris Spruck on Regex

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

OSCON is a busy conference. I met some sharp minds. I missed catching up with others. In my spare time, I'm testing the PHP 5.2 Windows installer that John Mertic is writing. At the moment John is working hard on getting the installer neat and reliable.

He notes that testing applications, once something a bit more buried in the development process, had three different mentions at this year's conference, at the PHP Lightning Talks.

Theo has posted the slides of his PHP lightning talk in PDF format. The topic? Why PHP sucks.

I've never disputed the fact that PHP has problems, but for some reason, everyone who tries to explain why PHP sucks misses most of the actual reasons it does. It's astonishing.

Chris also makes the comment that he doesn't actually give six reasons, but the first three of the ones he gives are solid ("No lexical scoping", "No namespacing", and "World's worst configure system").

I didn't attend Theo's talk, so the only information that I got was from the blog entries and slides. I realize that this short presentation was humorous, but it still brings up some points that have been nagging at the back of my head for a while now.

The comment in question is part of the Six Reasons PHP Sucks lightning talk.

The comment jokes about the quality of PEAR code. OF course, as Aaron notes, these types of comments aren't anythng new. The real issue at stake is that people don't understand PEAR. To help further the cause behind this (in)famous set of libraries, he's written an article for php|architect to dispell some of the myths.